Читать книгу Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Other People’s Marriages, Every Woman Knows a Secret, If My Father Loved Me, A Simple Life - Rosie Thomas - Страница 13

Forty excited children seethed under the magnificent fan-vaulted roof of the cathedral’s chapter house and leapt on and off the ancient stone seats that lined the walls, unawed by their surroundings. It was the first full rehearsal for the annual Grafton nativity play.

Marcelle Wickham sat on a folding chair with a list and a clipboard, and a wicker hamper beside her. Daisy Wickham had been chosen to be one of the angel chorus. It was an honour but it was a double-edged one, because with the invitation had come a suggestion that Daisy’s mother might like to help with the costumes. Marcelle had sighed, and then for Daisy’s sake agreed that she would be glad to do it. Now, with three weeks before the first performance, sixteen of the children were still uncostumed, including the ox and the ass.

Marcelle looked up from her list to see Nina standing beside her.

Nina was wearing her bright red jacket and her hair frizzed out over her shoulders, reminding Marcelle of her first glimpse of her in the supermarket. She shone like a beacon against the austere stone backdrop of the chapter house.

‘Thanks for coming,’ Marcelle said.

The director was calling his cast to order. Marcelle and Nina lowered their voices.

‘The ones I’ve finished are in here.’ Marcelle lifted the lid of her wicker hamper.

Nina unfolded an angel’s robe. The fabric was the cheapest plain white cotton but the garment was beautifully cut, with a yoke and falling folds of sleeve.

‘No tinsel haloes?’ she asked.

‘No tinsel haloes. To Daisy’s great disappointment.’

‘So what would you like me to do?’

She had heard Marcelle talking about the cathedral play, and about the sewing that remained to be done, and had diffidently offered to help her. In the last weeks Nina had felt the cathedral beckoning her, so that her steps continually returned to it. The creamy stone of the great pillars and arches and the pieced-together miracle of the medieval glass thrilled her as they had always done, but now she was as much affected by its place at the heart of Grafton. The towers and pinnacles seemed to gather the streets inwards, anchoring and interpreting them, and connecting the lives beyond them.

Once she would have dismissed the idea as fanciful, but she was convinced that the cathedral and its works were the secular as well as the spiritual heart of Grafton. The business park and the shopping precinct and the closes and avenues of new houses were only peripheral, the bright green leaves, whereas the cathedral was the roots and more than the roots, the black earth itself. Nina had never experienced any religious feeling and she did not know if what she was experiencing was religious, but she loved the sense of continuity, of the daily services that were offered up whether the people came or not, and the rhythms of the chapter and the close beyond her windows.

Marcelle said, apologetically, ‘It’s the animals, really. The ox and the ass, and the lambs. I know it’s a cheek, asking a professional artist like you, but I thought perhaps some painted masks …’

Nina cut her short. ‘I can do masks, if that’s what you would like. Or I can do more representational heads, if you would rather. Not fibreglass or anything too ambitious but papier-mâché needn’t be as tacky as it sounds.’

‘Could you?’

‘Easily.’

‘I think masks. The children are quite small, especially the lambs. Those are the two, at the front.’

A pair of six-year-olds, one with a head of tight brassy curls, squirmed at the front of the group of children.

The angel choir had shuffled to its feet, Daisy Wickham amongst them. They were joined by the twelve boy choristers from the Cathedral School and their musical director raised his hand.

The children began to sing the Coventry Carol.

Nina’s eyes and throat were stung by the sweetness of it. Her parents had brought her to the cathedral every Christmas to see the nativity play and to hear the carols. She was swept back to childhood and the memories of hard wooden seats and the faint smell of cough sweets and fir boughs.

Daisy Wickham peered sideways to make sure her mother was watching, and then made an embarrassed face at her.

From the four rows of children Nina picked out another face she knew, or thought she recognized. He was amongst the choristers, a boy of about nine. He had a cap of fair hair cut in a square fringe above his eyebrows, and a round, sweet, rather stolid face.

‘That must be a little Frost, surely, the one at the front on the left?’

‘Yes. It’s William, the younger one.’

He was like his brother, but his features were still girlish and pretty. Nina watched the boy as the carol ended, and reflected on the slow changes that would transmute him into the glowering adolescent and then, at last, into a version of Andrew Frost.

For the first time in many months she wished for a child of her own, to see her growing and unfolding in the way that William Frost would do.

The rehearsal ended at eight. By the time it was over Marcelle and Nina had divided the outstanding cutting and sewing between them, and Nina had promised to bring roughs of her masks to the next rehearsal.

‘I’m so grateful,’ Marcelle said. She was, in truth, because she was sure that whatever Nina undertook to do would be done well.

They said their good nights and separated. Nina walked away across the green, thinking of Vicky at home with her husband and her new baby, and of the choir of angels, other women’s children, rehearsing their carols.

Marcelle drove across town with Daisy in the back. She was a good driver and she felt comfortable, in this brief interlude, within the insulated box of her car. She liked the soft greenish glow of the instrument panel and the slow burr of the heater, and the way the lights outside licked over her face and then receded behind her. She would have been happy if home had been much further away; if she could have driven on, suspended like this, with the traffic blinking past on the opposite side of the road.

When she reached the house, Marcelle noted that a light was on behind the drawn curtains in Michael’s upstairs study. The tranquillity induced by the night drive was slipping away from her. Her mouth tightened, she felt it, and felt the vertical lines marking her cheeks.

‘Here we are, home again,’ she said brightly to Daisy. Michael’s car was in the garage. She left hers on the sloping drive, and carried Daisy’s music case up to the front door as the tired child shuffled behind her.

The house was quiet, except for the distant sound of the television. Marcelle let her bag and Daisy’s music drop on to the hall floor.

The air seemed heavy and stale with the taint of Sunday’s unresolved quarrel.

It had been a terrible argument, the more frightening because it had swelled out of almost nothing, out of an ordinary weekend disagreement about whether Michael devoted enough time to his children. He had come into the kitchen, dressed for golf.

Marcelle had demanded, ‘Are you going out again? What about Jon and Daisy, don’t you think they might like to see their father on a Sunday? They don’t see you all week, do they?’

‘Yes, I am going out. I’m going to play golf. I work hard and I need time away from there’ – he meant the concrete and glass slabs of the hospital ‘– and from here as well.’ Michael had made a gesture with his hand as if to push back the walls of their house.

The resolute coldness in him had scared her, and then it had made her angry. She stared back at him over the chopping board, the kitchen table, the basket of ironing waiting to be folded.

‘I work hard, too, Michael. What about me?’

His anger had answered hers, and then exceeded it.

‘Everything here is about you. Your standards, your ideals. You want to be the perfect mother with the perfect family, you want your job, you want your house just so. It’s all to do with what you want. You want it, you have it, but don’t expect me to conform to the design.’

‘It isn’t a design. I do it out of love for you all.’

Marcelle had begun to shout. Her fear was intensifying but it became fear of herself, because she never shouted, never made scenes.

‘It doesn’t come across as love.’

‘I can’t help that, Michael. Perhaps you can’t accept what you won’t give.’

‘It’s always me, isn’t it? What I can’t or won’t do? I support you, don’t I? You have your children, your hobbies, your sewing and cooking. It doesn’t seem to me that you have a bad bargain.’

‘Cooking isn’t a hobby, it’s my job. I make my contribution, as far as I can, with two children to care for as well.’

The argument had grown, sloughing and bouncing between the two of them and gathering momentum until it became an avalanche of unleashed resentment. Reason and consideration had seemed to stand up like sticks in its path, only to be snapped and swept away.

‘Perhaps the truth is that you don’t love me any longer,’ Marcelle said.

‘Perhaps,’ Michael agreed coldly.

The avalanche had run out of impetus, with no more ground to consume. Hot-mouthed, they regarded each other across the bleak murrain.

Marcelle had become aware of the heavy silence spreading through the house. She knew that the children were crouching upstairs in their bedrooms, listening to their parents’ ranting voices. She had felt pinched with shame, for herself and for them.

A moment later Jonathan had appeared pale-faced at the head of the stairs.

‘Don’t argue,’ he had shouted. ‘Stop arguing.’

‘Adults do argue,’ Michael told him sharply. ‘That’s something for you to learn.’

He had gone out, then, with his golf bag slung over his shoulder.

Jonathan’s homework books were spread on the kitchen table now, but Jonathan was in the next room watching television. Michael had collected him from a late evening at school. The boy glanced up at his mother and sister.

‘Hello, Ma, Daze.’

‘Hello, Jon. Had a good day? Where’s Daddy?’

Marcelle asked the question although she knew the answer already.

Jonathan shrugged. His eyes had returned to the television screen. ‘Upstairs, working.’

Marcelle ran Daisy’s bath and saw her into it. Then she went along the landing to Michael’s study and opened the door. He was sitting at his desk, surrounded by papers and files and medical journals. He had been staring at a research paper, but he had taken in none of the information it contained. Instead, since Marcelle had come in, he had been listening to the sounds of the house. There had been a quickening of the air, and the joists and timbers had seemed to creak under the pressure of her briskness. He heard her feet on the stairs, and the sound of water running, and the children following her directions. This was so familiar to him that he had to concentrate to extract the idea of his wife, separate in herself, from the fug of domesticity. He was frowning when she opened the door.

‘Had a good day?’ he asked, taking off his reading glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose.

Marcelle saw the frown. ‘Yes, not bad. Nina’s going to help me with the costumes for the play.’

‘That’s good.’

‘I’ll see Daisy into bed, then I’ll make some supper.’

‘Fine. I’ll be down before too long.’

Marcelle hesitated, running her fingers around the smooth circumference of the doorknob. She was reassured to see him, here in his place, because she was half afraid that there would come an evening when he would not return home. But her relief was immediately soured by her resentment of him, and the two sensations made a sickly brew inside her. Struggling with herself she went and stood beside his chair. When she looked down she could see the patch of thin hair on his crown, and the fine network of thread veins on the nearest cheek.

In a distant voice she offered, ‘If what happened on Sunday was my fault, I’m sorry for it.’

It was the first time it had been mentioned since Michael’s return on Sunday afternoon.

After a moment, he said, ‘I am sorry, too.’

He did not make any move to touch her, even to take her hand, as he once would have done. Marcelle waited, staring at the work on his desk. It was a report on the orthopaedic rehabilitation of geriatric patients after hip replacement operations.

‘Will you come down and have a drink?’ she asked, wanting to find a warmer voice than the small, cold one that came out of her.

‘I won’t be too long,’ he repeated.

She left him to his work, and went to see the children into their beds.

Gradually the baby’s mouth went slack and the drowsy sucking stopped completely. Her head fell back as her gums released the breast. Vicky held her still for a minute, gazing at the tiny dark crescents of her eyelashes and the whitish pad of tissue on her upper lip, rimmed with milk. This baby was like Mary and Alice had been but she was also different, more beautiful and more precious, because she would be the last one. There was no doubt about that. Gordon would never agree to a third try for a boy.

Vicky rocked the baby in her arms, softly humming. She had already forgotten the painful labour and her stitches and the depression that had assailed her in hospital. She had come home and her life had closed around her again. The girls were pleased with their new sister, and Gordon was being assiduous in his efforts to help. Helen slept, and fed, and slept again. The house enclosed them all, like a warm cocoon.

When she was quite sure that the baby was asleep, Vicky lifted her up and walked softly into the next room. She wrapped her in her white blanket and laid her down in the Moses basket.

It was the middle of the morning. This was the time that always seemed to Vicky to be the brightest and safest of the whole day. It was an optimistic interim of radio music and kettles and vacuum cleaners, before the day tipped over into the more ambivalent stretches of the afternoon. When she was at work, at the clinic, she liked to see child patients at this innocent time.

There was no need to think about work yet, she reflected. The remaining weeks of her maternity leave stretched ahead of her.

Vicky went into the kitchen and leaned against the sink, looking out into the wintry garden. There was an inverted pyramid of baby clothes hanging on the tree of the rotary clothesline. It was a day of thin sunshine and the shafts of light struck horizontally through the windows. Dust motes swirled like light particles in the solid-seeming bars of brightness. She felt dreamy, almost dazed by the colourless sunlight falling on her face.

When the telephone rang on the wall beside her she lifted it absently and murmured, ‘Hello?’

There was the momentary weightless silence that signalled Gordon on his car telephone.

‘Darling? Is that you? You sound funny. Are you all right?’

‘Yes, I’m fine. Helen has just gone to sleep. Isn’t it a lovely day?’

‘What? Yes, beautiful. I wanted to make sure you were okay. I’m going to be on site for most of the rest of the day, and it’ll be difficult to reach me.’

‘Don’t worry. We’re perfect here, Helen and me.’

‘I’ll ring you later, then. You’ll call Janice or someone, if you need anything?’

‘Of course I will. I don’t need anything. Thanks, anyway. Gordon?’

‘Yes?’

‘I love you.’ She cradled the receiver against her shoulder, still looking out at the garden and the clothes gently rotating on the line.

‘Love you too. I won’t be late,’ Gordon said.

Vicky hung up. Moving slowly, luxuriating in the light, she filled the kettle and admired the diamond flashes in the water as it splashed in the sink.

Gordon drove back the way he had just come, this time with Nina beside him. The interior of the car seemed full of the scent of her, and the ends of her hair and the soft points of wool that stood up from her clothes gave off a crackle of static electricity. He wanted to touch her, rubbing her to discharge the sparks and then to press his mouth against her and drink her in.

‘Where are we going?’

He was watching the road, but he was pricklingly aware of the pull of the muscles around her mouth, the sheen of her skin and the bloom of tiny hairs revealed by the oblique sunlight. It was no less than miraculous that he had achieved this expedition with her, at the cost of nothing more than a small lie to Vicky and a penetrating glance from Andrew as he had eased himself out of the office.

‘You know where we are going,’ he answered. ‘To buy you a car.’

Teasingly, Nina had repeated Hannah’s suggestion to him, and he had responded to it in full seriousness. She had been touched.

‘Yes, I know that, and it’s very kind of you to take me.’

‘Kind?’

‘Certainly. But where are we going to buy me a car?’

‘To a Mercedes dealership I know. Near Bristol.’

‘Ah. Do I definitely need a Mercedes? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to settle for something utilitarian and Japanese?’

‘There is a Nissan place right opposite the Merc showroom, if you need to make a comparison. But it was you who mentioned a Mercedes in the first place.’

‘I know. I have always rather liked the idea.’

His hand left the wheel and reached for hers. Their hands locked together but they looked ahead, at the road signs that loomed and then whirled past rather than venture a glance at each other.

‘A Mercedes is a sensible car. Solid, reliable, immaculately engineered.’

Nina laughed at his earnestness. ‘If you say so.’

‘And sexy. If you choose the right model.’

‘Sexier than …’ Nina pursed her lips. ‘Hannah’s BMW, say?’

‘Much.’ He did look at her then, and she was surprised and then caught undefended by the heat in him. Their linked hands rested against her thigh. Nina heard the rasp of her own breathing.

‘Just as you are sexier than Hannah herself.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh, but you are. Hannah is obvious, whereas you are subtle. Hannah is a hot day at the beach and you, you are … a forest path in the moonlight. A matter of shadows and suggestions, and sudden clear patches of pure silver.’

This poetic flight from a man so unpoetical touched her again. She felt a kindling of affection that was separate from the welter of her other confused sensations.

Nina stared ahead of her again. A sign swept towards them. Bristol, 20m. Gordon disengaged his hand from hers as he overtook a Volvo the same colour as Janice’s. Lightheartedly, but also out of a secret kind of retrospective jealousy, she asked him, ‘Which of the other wives do you like? If not Hannah?’

Gordon shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Star, perhaps.’

Nina remembered the impression of her weeping at the Frosts’ on Sunday evening.

‘Is she unhappy?’

‘Who knows? No unhappier than anyone else would be, I imagine, married to Jimmy Rose.’

It was a deliberate deflection and Nina silently accepted it.

The Mercedes showroom was a sleek affair of plate-glass windows and shining bodywork by the side of a busy road amongst a network of more busy roads. There was indeed a Nissan garage directly opposite to it, a much brasher looking place with a border of snapping flags flying from tall white poles.

Nina and Gordon stepped out from Gordon’s car into a world of steel-blue reflections in glass and long, polished bonnets and cold sun striking darts from mirrors and chrome. Even the specks of mica underfoot twinkled up at them. They walked shyly to the doors of the showroom, half-dazzled by the light and pleased to find themselves as a couple in this adventure, as if they had emerged into a surprise holiday.

Once they were inside a salesman in a blue suit came briskly to meet them.

‘Good morning, sir, madam. Can I help you?’ He had a mouth overful of teeth, all of them bared in a smile.

‘Madam is looking for a car,’ Gordon said.

Nina was seized by an urge to giggle, and to dig him in the ribs with her elbow. Controlling herself she said seriously, pointing to the nearest blur of shining metal. ‘Something like this one, perhaps.’

‘Ah, yes. The 190E. That particular car is two years old, but covered by our full warranty, of course. The mileage is a shade higher than average, which is reflected in the price, naturally. The metallic jade is very popular. And the smoke grey interior.’

‘What else is there?’

‘What are you looking for, exactly? Is it the 190, or something larger? A new car, or a previously owned model?’

Nina blinked. ‘I’m not sure.’ And then seeing the man’s smile patronizingly widen she improvised, ‘A saloon car, not too big. It doesn’t have to be new.’

Gordon, her lifeline, had wandered away. She saw him amongst the curves and planes of metal, appraising the machines. It made her think romantically of his business, translating spidery plans into airy structures of glittering tensile steel. She followed him towards the back of the showroom, with the salesman beside her.

Gordon stopped alongside a red car. It was the colour of audacious lipstick, and it had a black hood and wheels of silver spokes and the air of being inappropriately corralled here amongst the humbler models.

‘What about this?’ Gordon murmured.

‘This one?’ Nina touched the long nose of it. Her fingertip left a tiny smudge on the sheen of scarlet.

The salesman was there at once. ‘The 500SL. Power hood, thirty-two valve engine, the top of the range. A very nice car. This one is a year old, twelve thousand miles, one gentleman owner, fully serviced by us from new.’

He jingled with the ignition key and pressed a switch to the right of the gear lever. The hood began to glide upwards and backwards, and then slowly furled itself like some fantastical umbrella. Inside there were black leather seats, a walnut fascia and a little leather-rimmed steering wheel.

‘It is very pretty,’ Nina said.

‘Top speed of 155 m.p.h. Not that that is much use to us here, but dead handy on the Continent. The car’s capable of more, but the governor cuts in at that point. Nought to sixty in six point five seconds, so you won’t be finding many of the boy racers in XR3s cutting you up at the lights.’

‘Very impressive.’

Behind the salesman’s shoulder Gordon silently mouthed at her, ‘Very sexy.’

Nina kept her face straight.

‘Would you like to test drive it at all?’

The car gleamed at her in its bright red glory. She could see her face reflected in the voluptuous curve of the wing, her hair reddened to a blaze. This wasn’t the sober saloon she had envisaged.

‘Why not?’

There was at once a clicking of fingers and opening of tall doors behind her. The salesman sprang into the black leather seat and switched on the engine. A soft purr with a threatening, throaty undertone rose like bubbles through champagne. Smiling like truant children, Gordon and Nina followed the car outside. The salesman climbed out and held the driver’s door open for Nina.

‘But there are only two seats,’ she said.

Gordon bowed. ‘I’ll wait. Enjoy the drive.’

Nina slid into the car and braced her hands experimentally on the wheel. She looked down the nose of it to the gun-sight of the three-pointed star on the end, and gently touched her foot to the accelerator.

‘Left around the building, and then right into the main road,’ the salesman encouraged her. As she eased the Mercedes away Nina distinctly heard Gordon’s wolf-whistle.

At first she was nervous, and then she was exhilarated. The purr modulated to a noise like tearing silk and the car shot forward. She swung the wheel too hard and had to jerk it back again, and they sailed out into the stream of traffic.

‘Power steering,’ the salesman reminded her.

It was very fast. The road opened up and the bunch of dull cars in their wake dwindled to dots in her mirror. She braced her arms and felt the car respond to the lightest touch on the wheel. The glossy bonnet in front of her shimmered like a stretched satin ribbon, and the grey road temptingly unwound ahead.

The salesman had been reciting the selling points, but now he had gone quiet. Nina glanced at his face, and then at the speedometer. She was doing a hundred and five miles an hour. She lifted her foot, and the scenery caught up with her again.

‘Quite a quick motor,’ the man said. ‘I can see you like that.’

‘I do, rather,’ Nina said, surprised by herself.

But she knew that she had been entirely seduced. The more she drove the car, the more she wanted to drive it. The speedometer crept up again, and her head fell back, and she wanted to turn on the radio and sing and drive straight on for ever into the winter sun.

‘We could make a turn just ahead,’ the salesman ventured.

Reluctantly she did as she was told.

When they swooped back to the showroom and Nina saw Gordon innocently lounging with hands in pockets beside his own unremarkable family saloon she muttered a mock curse under her breath. It cost her a pang to climb out of the black leather seat and abandon her bright red seducer, even temporarily.

Gordon strolled over to meet them. ‘How was it?’

The salesman fanned himself with his clipboard.

‘I liked it,’ Nina said demurely.

‘Shall we go across there and have a look?’ Gordon nodded at the busy flags over the lines of Nissans.

Nina turned her back on them and stretched her fingers out again to the red shine. There was nothing so vulgar as a price ticket anywhere in sight.

‘How much is it?’

The man consulted a list on his clipboard. ‘Sixty-two nine fifty, this particular car.’

She was opening her mouth, amazingly, to say I’ll take it, when she felt Gordon’s hand descend very firmly on her arm.

‘We’ll just take a walk, and think about it.’

Then they were outside again in the cold sunshine. A stronger wind had begun to blow, and there was a fringe of cloud away to the east.

‘I loved it. It isn’t at all what I intended to buy, and now I can’t bear to think of settling for anything less.’

Her cheeks were hot. Gordon’s arm and shoulder felt very warm on one side and the chill on the other sliced into her. She realized that her blood was racing, and that she was excited, for the car and for the bright day and for Gordon himself. He lowered his head and kissed her, open-mouthed. His hand slid inside her coat.

‘Can you afford it?’

She thought of the money that Richard had left her, dead weights of it invisibly stored up in banks and securities, and of Richard himself, as she had never seen him, lying on the path under the branches of the trees. He was gone, and he would never come back.

‘Yes, I can pay cash.’

His eyes widened a fraction, and the palm of his hand grazed her nipple under the layers of clothes.

Speed, and money, and sex, Nina thought giddily. The old cliché. But it was none the less exciting for that.

‘Then let me do the deal for you,’ Gordon said.

They went back to the showroom together, and he began to negotiate.

From the salesman’s face, Nina knew that he was jealous of them both. He was jealous of her for her car and her money, and of Gordon for his possession of her. The atmosphere in the mock-plush side office was as tense as a drawn wire.

‘I can’t go any lower than that. That’s shaved our profit right down to a couple of points,’ the man complained.

‘Then we’ll go along to Forshaw’s and see what they can offer us,’ Gordon said simply. Nina was awed.

After half an hour, she had her red car for exactly fifty-five thousand pounds, and the salesman was wiping his forehead with a folded handkerchief.

‘I’ll come in with a banker’s draft the day after tomorrow,’ Nina said and smiled.

They shook hands, at last.

Outside again, Nina put her arm through Gordon’s.

‘You were terrible. The poor little man.’

‘Poor nothing. He doesn’t sell many of those in a week.’

‘My beautiful new car. Thank you.’

On the forecourt, faced off by the lines of Nissans, they kissed again. Nina shivered with his arms around her.

‘Get in,’ Gordon said, and held the door for her. They drove away in silence, aware of their own breathing and the fog of one another’s breath on the cold air. When they reached the motorway Nina slyly put her hand out, reaching for him with the images of smooth red wings and the glitter of chrome in her mind.

‘It’s a long way home,’ she whispered.

He knew that she had been turned on by the car, and by the whole secret, frivolous expedition they had made together, and that seemed to him delightful and also erotic.

‘I can’t wait that long,’ Gordon said roughly.

Ahead of them was a sign for a motorway rest area, and amongst the blue and white symbols innocently offering themselves there was a bed. It had a head and foot and a neatly turned-down white sheet.

Nina heard the tick-tick of the indicator, and they swung left in a line of drivers leaving the motorway. The Travelodge at the far side of the enclave was deserted at this time of day, the double row of windows masked by net curtains. There were no other cars in the motel’s parking area.

‘Wait here for me,’ Gordon said.

After he had gone through a door at the end of the block marked ‘Reception’, Nina felt suddenly conspicuous sitting alone in his car. She sank lower into her seat, drawing the collar of her coat up around her neck, and then dismissed her fears as absurd and sat upright again. A moment later Gordon came back and took his place behind the wheel once more. Then he opened his hand to show her a key with a plastic number tag. They both stared at it.

‘Do you want to do this?’ he asked her. ‘In a motel room, with me?’

She gazed out at the windswept tarmac and the tossing branches of trees that had been planted to break the noise of the road.

Gordon said, ‘The other night was happenstance. We can dismiss that, if you like. You were lonely, I stepped out of line, Vicky was in hospital.’

The second time, she supplied for him, was different. It was a matter of volition, and if the act was repeated they would have to make the necessary reckonings afterwards. Her own husband was dead; this man, with his direct language and appetite, was another woman’s husband. She knew the weight of her own loneliness, and remembered how Gordon had lightened it, and understood equally well that he would not and could not entirely dissolve it for her.

But even as Nina pondered the equation, with her eyes fixed on the trees, she was forced to acknowledge that she did want him again. More than that, it was inconceivable that she would find the strength of will to deny that she did. This mundane place, the breeze-block outline of the motel, and the key in his hand, were invested with significance because of their association with him. She did not understand how this had happened, only that it had happened and she could not now escape whatever was to follow.

She took the key from his hand, and metal and plastic jingled together.

‘I do want to,’ she told him.

He kissed her, forcing her head back against the headrest, and his mouth grazed her skin. They left the car, and walked unsteadily towards the motel room.

It was a small rectangular box, with a hollowed bed flanked by cheap drawers faced in brown plastic veneer. A bathroom walled into one corner revealed pink tiles and a floral curtain.

Gordon tossed the key on to the bedcover.

‘I’m sorry. This is horrible.’

He was thinking of the pale, dignified spaces of her house in Dean’s Row. He remembered her bedroom as clearly as if he was looking at a photograph of it. But he had wanted this second time, if it was to happen, to be in a neutral place that was neither hers nor his.

‘It isn’t horrible or beautiful. It’s nowhere,’ Nina said gently.

He was grateful to her for this reading of his needs. But now they faced each other in the perfunctory approximation of a bedroom, a place that was occupied without affection by hurried businessmen and travellers and illicit lovers like themselves, he saw their condition more clearly, stripped of its romantic glow. He saw a middle-aged man, made weary of his good wife by the repetition of too many days. He had brought Nina here – and in this clear light he knew that she was not the wild girl he had conjured up the other night but a sad widow, also no longer young, with fine lines in her face – to commit an act of adultery.

A memory of the cathedral on the night he had shown it to her came back to him. He had been intent on Nina, but he also remembered the organ music and the singing of the choir at practice. He was not a conventionally religious man, and he had married Vicky in a register office, but he had a confused sense of a simple and faithful life, established and approved by a higher authority, that might have been lived along lines that were parallel to but infinitely distant from the tangle and heat and disillusion of his real existence.

‘What is it?’ Nina asked him.

He tried to say ‘nothing’ but at the same time he half turned away from her, looking through the net curtains to where his car was parked between oblique white lines.

‘Guilt. And fear, and a belated desire not to hurt anyone.’

She went to him and put her arms around his waist, under the shelter of his jacket, and held him as if he were a child, or an old friend.

‘Yes,’ Nina said. ‘I understand.’

Because of the simplicity of her response, and also because he did see her face so clearly and close up with the marks of time and grief in it, he felt his doubts gather together and lift and swing away from him. He was left with pure conviction.

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I loved you the other night, at Andrew’s. In that bathroom.’

He also wanted her, more insistently than he had ever wanted Vicky or any of the women he had ever known.

She put her hand up to his mouth, to stop him, but he caught it and held it.

‘I love you,’ he repeated. ‘I don’t know how this has happened. I didn’t ask for it, but it’s here and I don’t want it to go away. I don’t want you to go away, never, never.’

He was whispering to her, with his lips against her face. All the perspectives had changed. The room had become a sanctuary, benign and familiar and precious for that, and the horizons beyond it had vanished as if a thick, kindly mist had descended.

‘You don’t love me. You can’t love me because you don’t know me,’ Nina told him. Richard had known her, after their years together.

‘I do know you. What more do I need to learn?’

He undid her clothes and peeled them off her tea-freckled shoulders. He kissed her skin and tasted the warm saltiness of it, and pushed her back until they lay in the bed’s hollow and gazed into the reflections in each other’s eyes.

‘Take off your clothes too,’ she ordered him.

He clawed at the buttons and buckles, discarding the business carapace. Her knuckles clashed against his as their hands worked. Then, when he knelt above her, she stared up at him and her lips and eyelids were thickened with lust. He remembered how she had looked the first time, in her unornamented bedroom.

Nina’s hand descended on him, and she watched the effect through half-closed eyes. A moment later they were tangled together, mouths and hands and limbs. Her narrow hips insinuated themselves beneath him, snakily lifting, not offering herself but commanding him. She was different from Vicky, who waited to be led. Vicky was not submissive, not exactly, but there was an understanding that she preferred to bestow rather than to demand. There was a moment’s pure confusion as the woman beneath him receded and then merged with the familiar images of his wife, and then split away to resume her own identity, utterly strange to him.

The marriage of strangeness with intimacy was like a chemical entering his bloodstream, sending such a narcotic kick through his body that he was afraid he would come now, too soon, like a boy.

‘Tell me what you think. What you feel,’ she demanded when he came into her. And then, ‘Oh, I want you.’

‘You’ve got me. Nina, Nina. I think you are extraordinary, unmatchable. I feel like fucking you for ever.’

He wanted to bury himself, to shoot himself into a milky galaxy of stars inside her. He wanted to become timeless and fathomless, as if he had died and turned into a star, as his mother had long ago promised he would do.

Instead, their coupling in the motel room was quick, and feverish. The carnality of it startled them both. There was no time, as they had felt there was time the first night. They longed to reclaim one another after the separation. There were the Frosts’ dinner party and London and the days in between to be obliterated, and the car showroom and the salesman and the motel itself. They went at each other blindly, as if it was the last thing they would ever do.

Afterwards, lying with Nina’s hair spread over his eyes and her weight on top of him, Gordon imagined the noise they had made penetrating the stud walls into the mirror boxes on either side of them, and into the ones beyond those, and he prayed fervently that they were empty.

When his breathing became even again he stroked her hair away and peered upwards, trying to see her face. She was staring at the woodchip wallpaper. He was at once intensely jealous of whatever it was that held her attention away from him.

‘I meant it, you know.’

‘Meant?’

‘I love you.’

‘Hush.’

Her face, the skin over the bone, and the rest of her body, had now become irrelevant, although he loved them also with a kind of detached affection. He was much more vividly aware of the internal spark, the invisible imp, that animated her. He wanted to catch hold of it, and wondered at his own possessiveness.

‘Tell me more about Richard.’

‘I was thinking about him just then. How did you know?’

‘A guess. Not a particularly inspired one.’

She leaned over him, her small bumpy breasts falling against his chest.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that I had withdrawn from you. I think of him often. It’s very odd when someone who is quite young and apparently fit dies suddenly, like Richard did. One minute the person is there, filling your life, and then in a day, in an hour, he is completely gone and will never come back.’

‘What do you feel now?’

‘I’m not sure. Grateful, usually. For what we had, you know.’

He digested that for a moment.

‘What do you want from me?’

He heard himself asking, like a petulant boy, for reassurance, compliments, approval.

Nina propped her head on one elbow, looking down at him. She appeared to be amused, and he was momentarily irritated by her.

‘I mean, I’m only a simple bloody engineer. I’m not rich or smart or clever. I don’t know the right restaurants in London, I can’t even fix the right restaurant here. I’m married, I’ve got three kids, too much work to do …’

She cut him short. ‘I don’t want anything from you.’

Then she indicated the room. He examined the MDF fittings and plyboard wardrobe with plastic knobs, the wall-mounted mirror and the round tin tray bearing a kettle and a sugar bowl filled with teabags, sachets of coffee and milk powder.

‘Just this,’ she said. And with a touch of coquetry she ran the flat of her hand up his flank, over the thickening flesh at his waist to rest on his chest. Under her hand, it seemed to Gordon that she had it in her power to make the drab place beautiful, and to invest him with more significance than he could ever truly possess. He felt a lick of undiluted happiness.

‘Are you afraid of it? Of me?’ Nina demanded.

‘No. Not a bit. I can’t believe my luck, that’s all.’

‘Or I mine,’ she told him softly.

He saw that she was cold and he drew the covers around her shoulders. She settled herself comfortably against him and they lay in silence for a minute.

‘I won’t try to take you away from Vicky.’

It was a promise she felt obliged to make, although she was not sure she would be able to keep it. It was hard enough to accept that she must relinquish him in an hour, as she would have to.

‘I know that. Thank you.’

He felt a separate, invincible tenderness now for his wife and daughters. It was important that they should not be hurt, whatever came.

Gordon was full of optimism. He kissed the top of Nina’s head. ‘Come and get into the bath with me.’

They went into the windowless pink cell and ran the water, and Nina emptied the contents of all the complimentary sachets into it so that bubbles mounted to engulf the taps, and steam obliterated the mirrors. They lay down in the foam, folding their limbs to accommodate themselves, and sickly scented water slopped over the edge of the bath and puddled the tiles.

They talked through the steam, exchanging simple details about their lives. It seemed important that they should know if the other had sisters or not, had travelled and how far, could speak French if not German, had read Updike, disliked John Major.

When the water was cold, Gordon said, ‘I must go back now.’

They dried each other, gently like children, and disen-tangled their clothes.

When they were ready to leave they stood in the doorway, gazing back at the bed and the tea tray and the surfaces of plastic veneer. Then Gordon closed the door, with affection, as if he was sealing into the room a portion of their history.

They drove quietly back to Grafton. The weather was changing; the sky was clouded and a bruised light looked as if it might be the herald of snow.